DBWI: The United States wasn't officially Christian?

As we all know the founding fathers of the United States of America took a bold step in the direction of liberal values in the founding of their nation, by declaring in the constitution that all varieties of Christianity (even Catholicism) were to be the official religion of the new nation.
But some of the more radical framers wanted it to go further still and declare that there was no state religion at all.
What if this had actually succeeded?
 
I guess the rift between French and American republicanism wouldn't be as great ITTL, with the French after the revolution becoming secularists, lapsed Catholics, and deists, while America was a hodgepodge of new religious movements. This may also avoid the French-American War, and with it, the persecution of Voodoo religion in Saint-Dominigue after the Americans conquered it from the French.
 
That could be a problem if birthright citizenship is still passed. This means we would end up with the decendents of those voodoo religion affecting politics.
 
And yet for all the wacky new religious movements kicking around in the public consciousness, most American politicians were Protestant. "All varieties of Christianity" sounded good, but America was always majority Protestant and this effectively made it a Protestant country in terms of who was actually sitting in Congress.

Maybe a less Christian America would've actually practiced the liberal values it preached. As it is, to this day in America you only have certain rights if you're any variety of Christian. Heaven forbid if you're a Jew, an atheist or even a Muslim, though obviously America has banned Muslim immigration for decades now. What started out as an overture towards liberalism has stuck in the minds of constitutionalists and made America a complete pariah in the face of a world which preferred French republicanism.
 
There would have been less violence between the various Protestant sects and the official 'state churches', since every single state has the right to establish it's own official state church. The controversies over what brand of Protestantism each church was to be tore entire states apart.

We wouldn't have over 70 states in the United States as a result, there'd be less incentive to take states apart if one section is, for example, majority Presbyterian, but the 'state church' was Lutheran.
 
What started out as an overture towards liberalism

Was the US's foundation really an overture towards liberalism? The US was clearly affected by the aristocratic Dutch Republic, to the point that its very name mirrors the "United Provinces of the Seven United Netherlands". And, of course, the old Dutch Republic was replaced by the Batavian Republic after a combination of local revolution and French invasion, which remains in place to this day.

The US should be seen as the last of the old republics, not as a revolutionary, popular state.
 
Was the US's foundation really an overture towards liberalism? The US was clearly affected by the aristocratic Dutch Republic, to the point that its very name mirrors the "United Provinces of the Seven United Netherlands". And, of course, the old Dutch Republic was replaced by the Batavian Republic after a combination of local revolution and French invasion, which remains in place to this day.

The US should be seen as the last of the old republics, not as a revolutionary, popular state.

It's still important to claim that first step, you can't draw a line in the sand between developments that took place over time. To divorce the United States from French Republicanism would be to deny the root of that revolutionary spirit. Were it not for the US being there to draw on for inspiration, the French may have descended into anarchy. The ideas of a written constitution, and everything else that came out of Philadelphia had an enormous effect on the later European Republics. That's not to say it wasn't a traditional oligarchic republic, but as we can tell by the later movements in the 1830s to expand the franchise to free, unlanded whites, the US was no Venice; that is to say it had the ability to reform itself and that's not something classical republics could do even when they were stable.

The US was a step in the right direction and if anything it should be counted more as a missing link than the last of an old form. I say this respectfully, Europeans are very touchy about their heritage.
 
Perhaps the Native Americans may have been treated a bit better without their forcible conversion to Christianity and assimilation. Maybe the Dakotas might have more than 20% of the population of Native descent without this process.
 
America really set the precedent for modern Christian states. Without their example of a state with (for the time) liberal laws but political support of religion, there would have been no counter example to the irreligious French Republic for nations like Spain or Austria to follow.
 
I don't see the church becoming as corrupt as it is today.I sometimes wonder if I'm listening to a ministry of God or the ministry of propiganda.
 
The thousands of people that died because of that stunt the US pulled with the creation of Israel and subsequent reactions from the Muslim world would have live probably.
 
Um, Israel wasn't exclusively an American creation? Zionists have been international since the first Congress held in Vienna. I'd argue Britain had more to do with it, especially in terms of financing the expeditions. After all, they were (and have been!) the ones that to benefit most from a friendly power controlling the Suez Canal.
 
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